


Fly Again

by 0bviousLeigh



Series: Children of War [3]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: M/M, Post-Series, Psychology, Speculation, portrayal of characters with mental disorders, this story is about surviving a war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 00:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7913833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0bviousLeigh/pseuds/0bviousLeigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Anxiety and Paranoia,’ Shun thinks to himself. Two words that supposedly sum up why he doesn’t trust anyone, why he’s angry all the time, why even now he doesn’t trust these pills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fly Again

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer – I am not a psychiatrist, or a therapist. I am a ball of unmanaged anxiety and managed depression. I can’t pretend to know, if Arc-V were a real series, what kinds of disorders these kids would come out of the war with, especially in Yuri’s case since even now, his character hasn’t really been fleshed out and we don’t know his past. I can only hazard a guess as to all of it, as well as how all of the Lancer’s problems would be treated. I can only hope to portray these issues in a respectful way. Please, if anyone has suggestions for me about this, let me know. Although I certainly hope that this is the extent of the psychological aspects of this fic, since it is not my area of expertise and I really don’t want to overstep my boundaries.

Shun has never been to therapy before, but he imagines it’s going to be incredibly frustrating. 'How do you feel? How does that feeling make you feel? How do you feel about feeling that way? How do you feel about talking about your feelings and how they make you feel?'

Shun slumps down in the passenger seat and grumbles under his breath. He’s not the only one who’s upset about this. Serena looks ready to jump out of the car, and Rin is twisting her seatbelt in her hands. They’re set to see the therapist, Dr. Izayoi, one after another, they’ll have two meetings with her, and then see a psychiatrist to discuss the possibility of medication, based on the therapists’ recommendations and what the psychiatrist, Dr. Fudo, thinks of her diagnosis.

The Sakaki household is just leaving the office when the Hiiragi household arrives. Shun’s eyes find Yuto right away.

Yuto goes to his side and whispers, “It wasn’t bad at all.”

Shun looks over the rest of the group. Yuya and Yuri look like they’ve seen ghosts. Yuri catches Shun’s gaze and snaps, “What are you looking at?”

Shun never thought he’d feel pity for Yuri, until he watched Leo Akaba shove Yuri down a flight of stairs and call him worthless. He remembers how Yuri had staggered to his feet, laughing, and screamed, “I did everything for you! I did everything you asked, every single thing! I became exactly what you wanted! You did this to me!” Yuri had stared at his own hands. “What have you done to me?”

Shun looks away. That doesn’t mean he’s forgiven Yuri.

In the office, the group meets Dr. Aki Izayoi. She’s young, wears her hair in a long braid, she’s not wearing a doctor’s coat, and she says that they can call her by her first name. The individual sessions take a while, and well over an hour has passed before Shun is called into the office.

“Sorry for the wait,” the doctor says as she closes the door behind Shun. The small room has a desk with a computer, a rolling chair, and two stationary armchairs that sit facing each other. Shun sits in one of the arm chairs, and to his surprise Dr. Izayoi sits across from him in the other chair, a paper pad balanced on her lap.

“Your name is Kurosaki Shun, yes?” she asks.

Shun nods.

“Seventeen years old?”

He nods again.

She sits back in her chair. “I’ve only been told that you grew up in the Xyz dimension and you were on the front lines of the inter-dimensional war. As I told your friends, I am trained in working with soldiers who return from battlefields, and that is what I am treating you as until I can work out exactly how the experience has affected you.”

Shun asks, “What makes you think you can work anything out at all? That what happened can…can be given a name and a pill?”

“Fair question,” Dr. Izayoi says. “Well, as far as pills go, that’s not a given. That depends on how you’re dealing, or not dealing, with what you saw. So tell me, what did you see that could be potentially affecting you?”

Shun balls his hands into fists. “I saw my city destroyed. I saw people…trapped, their souls taken away, in front of my eyes. I saw my friends get taken away. My sister was kidnapped—by Yuri, did he tell you that? He took my sister from me. Oh sure, he helped save us in the end, but not before he…” Shun cuts himself off. “No, Leo Akaba started this, not Yuri. Yuri just did his dirty work.”

“You’re still angry at Yuri, aren’t you?”

“I think Yuri’s got a lot to answer for,” Shun says through clenched teeth.

Dr. Izayoi asks, “Do you want to hurt him?”

Shun opens his mouth, then closes it. “I’m not…I would never do anything to hurt my chances of being Ruri’s brother again. But yeah, sometimes I want to punch him in the face.”

“So, what do you do when you feel like that?”

Shun stares at his lap. “Think about Ruri. Sometimes that just makes me madder, so then I think about…things he let slip, about what Leo Akaba put him through.”

“Would you say that on some level, you empathize with Yuri?”

Shun hesitates. “Maybe. I feel sorry for him, for some reason.”

Dr. Izayoi makes a note in her notebook. “And when you think about Ruri, do you find yourself scared for her?”

“Yes,” Shun says, “I lost her for…for months, and when she came back she wasn’t herself for a while, and I was afraid that I found her only to lose her again.”

“Are you still afraid of losing her?”

Shun clenches his jaw. This is entering into territory he doesn’t like. “I try not to think about it.”

“Okay,” Dr. Izayoi says. “Let’s change our approach here. You must have noticed some changes in yourself since your city was attacked. What’s different about you?”

“Everything!” Shun explodes, “God, everything is different! I had to put everything on the line in the effort to keep my city safe, and I lost it all. And now I’m stuck here, and I can’t go back and help rebuild, I have to stay here and listen to Ruri scream in her sleep, and see Serena come out of her room bleeding from her ear, and watch Shuzo hug Yuzu like he’s afraid she’ll disappear. I have to watch all that and, and…” He breaks off, panting.

Dr. Izayoi says calmly, “You still haven’t told me about yourself, Shun.”

Shun is beginning to see where this is going. She’s not going to stop until she peels Shun’s skin back and looks at his blackened insides.

“Fine,” Shun spits. “I don’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I think I’ll wake up back in the middle of the war. It ended too easily, I can’t believe it’s over. There’s gotta be another shoe that’s going to drop, because that’s all that ever happens. One problem is solved and BOOM! Here comes another one! So I’m waiting for the catch, for the boogeyman to jump out of the shadows. Or maybe this—” he gestures at the office, “Is the catch, that I have to stay here and be coddled like I didn’t hold myself together for years without help, so I can get weak and used to being protected, so the city I failed to protect can rebuild without me while I get to go off to school like nothing happened!”

Dr. Izayoi leans forward. “I am not here to belittle you, Shun. I don’t deny that you did amazing things. But you said it yourself, you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’re on edge, you can’t sleep. Does that sound like the life you want to live? There is nothing wrong with stepping back to take care of yourself, and you do need to take care of yourself. I certainly think that you’ve got a long life ahead of you, and it would be a real shame if you invested so much of yourself into saving the world, and then you didn’t get to enjoy your life in the world you saved. Are you happy, right now? Can you look at yourself and think, ‘I can live like this for the rest of my life?’”

Shun sits back in the chair. “I…guess not.”

Dr. Izayoi nods. “That’s what therapy and medication is for. It’s for helping you get back to being you. To feeling the way you used to, getting to sleep at night, hopefully, without the nightmares. But to do that, you have to talk to me. It may mean going out of your comfort zone and telling me things that you don’t want to admit about yourself. The things that truly scare you, what you saw, and how it’s affecting you now. Problems like that don’t just go away by themselves, and can I promise you that you’ll go back to exactly how you were before all this happened? No, I can’t, but I can try damn hard to help you get back to being someone who doesn’t constantly look over his shoulder.”

Shun bites his lip and looks down at his feet. When she puts it like that, it does make a lot of sense.

“What’s on your mind right now?” Dr. Izayoi asks.

Shun takes a deep breath. “I guess I never really thought about what would happen after. After Heartland was rebuilt. How I would live. I had a vague idea but…I didn’t factor in all the emotional baggage.”

“That’s not surprising to me,” Dr. Izayoi says. “No one accounts for emotional baggage. Then they get what they wanted and wonder why they’re not happy. Does that sound familiar to you?”

“I guess,” Shun says.

They talk a bit more after that, about the initial invasion of Heartland and what Shun did and saw. As the session comes to an end, Dr. Izayoi takes a piece of paper from her desk.

“I’m going to give you some possible things that may have been affecting you over the last two weeks, and you answer either ‘Not sure, some days, half the days, or nearly every day. Got it?”

Shun nods.

“Okay. You find that you’re unable to stop worrying, in general.”

“Nearly every day,” Shun says.

Dr. Izayoi circles something on the paper. She goes down the list, then puts the paper aside. “So, I’ll look over that paper and my notes, and we’ll talk more next time.”

They both stand, and Dr. Izayoi extends her hand. “It was good meeting you, Shun.”

Shun shakes her hand. “Yeah, you too Doctor…Um, Aki.”

“Call me whatever you’re most comfortable with,” Dr. Izayoi says.

Well, Shun’s already called her Dr. Aki, he might as well stick with it.

 

“It may take anywhere from two to three weeks for you to feel like the medication is making a difference,” Dr. Fudo had said when he gave Shun a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. “It’s a very small dosage. Don’t double up on it if you miss a dose, or feel like it’s not helping. As time goes on we can discuss if you feel like you need more, or if you feel like it’s not helping at all and you want to try something different.”

Shun is home alone. Everyone else has gone to look at a new house, and Shun faked a headache to get out of it. The pills are small and white, Shun thinks he can find a candy to replace them if he flushes them down the toilet. They’re supposed to help him, Dr. Aki said this was about getting Shun to feel like himself again.

‘Anxiety and Paranoia,’ Shun thinks to himself. Two words that supposedly sum up why he doesn’t trust anyone, why he’s angry all the time, why even now he doesn’t trust these pills. He’s been taking them as ordered, because Ruri begged him to. Ruri got away with just sleep-aides, Dr. Fudo said her stress disorder could be treated with talk therapy and coping mechanisms alone, at least for now. Ruri put all her trust in the doctors and pleaded with Shun to trust her, even if he couldn’t trust Dr. Fudo.

The doorbell rings and Shun jumps. He shoves the pill bottle into his pocket, goes downstairs and peers through the door.

“What do you want?” Shun calls to Yuri through the closed door.

“To talk to you all.”

“It’s just me,” Shun says.

“Well can I come in anyway?” Yuri asks.

Shun hesitates, then opens the door. Yuri has a leash in his hand, and a stout dog walks on the other end of it.

“He follows me everywhere,” Yuri says, following Shun’s gaze. “Apparently his name is En, but I hate that name so I call him Dog.”

Shun steps back and lets Yuri and En into the house. “What do you want?” Shun asks again.

Yuri takes a deep breath. “I wanted to say that I’m…I’ve been thinking and…talking to Aki…and Yuya and Yugo and Yuto, and they all think…and I think that I should…could you look away please? This is hard enough without you staring me down.”

Shun looks up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” Yuri blurts.

Shun looks back at him. “Pardon?”

“I’m sorry,” Yuri says again. “I don’t expect you, or Rin or Ruri or Yuzu to ever forgive me but I had to say it. I’m sure I’ll talk to them all at some point but I was…wrong.”

Shun is in shock. “What have they got you medicated on?”

Yuri’s hand tightens around En’s leash. “I’m not,” he says quietly.

“You’re _not?_ ” Shun repeats.

Yuri looks down. “I know. I thought for sure…but they said that there’s so much wrong with me, they have to untangle it all first before they can medicate me, or else they might make it worse.” He holds up his fingers and ticks off each disorder he brings up. “They say I grew up with a Machiavellian personality, which basically means I’m unemotional and detach myself from conventional morality so I can trick others, but they say I might be improving on that. In the meantime they’ve said I show signs of having PTSD, anti-social personality disorder, and possible obsessive-compulsive disorder but they haven’t quite figured it out yet. If they give me depressants to calm me down, it would negatively affect the PTSD symptoms. If they give me mood enhancers, it might worsen the OCD.”

Yuri suddenly looks up. “And I’m not saying it so you feel sorry for me,” he snaps, “I’m just saying it so you don’t think I’m getting special treatment by not being medicated. Not that I expect you to feel pity for me either. In fact, I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Goodbye.” He turns and walks out the door, the dog trotting along after him.

Shun takes the pill bottle out of his pocket and stares at it. How is it possible that Yuri could be worse off than he is?

 

“It’s not a competition to see who’s sicker,” Yuto says. Shun called him and asked him to come over, and they’re sitting on Mr. Hiiragi’s bed (the one Shun has currently taken over) and talking about Yuri.

“Yes it is,” Shun protests.

“We’re supposed to help each other,” Yuto says. “Not fight each other.”

“But we’ve been fighting him since Heartland was invaded,” Shun says. “You were there, you saw everything, how can you defend him?”

Yuto flinches.

Shun presses his fingers against his forehead. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yes, you did,” Yuto says, “But I can’t say I blame you. You must feel like I betrayed you.”

“No, never,” Shun says. He’s lying, but Yuto is his best friend.

Yuto holds up his hand. “When Yuya, Yugo, and Yuri dueled Leo Akaba, I was there. It was weird, being inside Yuya’s head. Sometimes I saw everything, sometimes I didn’t. but that duel, I saw everything. When all four of our dragons were assembled, when they were all on brought together on Yuya’s field, something happened. The four of us kind of, came together as one person. We had felt it before, but it was never as intense as this. You saw our bodies—or their bodies—stay the same, but inside it was totally different. It was like our minds fused together. All our memories, our feelings, our thoughts and hopes, they were all together, and we shared all of them. I know it only lasted a few seconds in real time, but for us it was an eternity. I saw everything that had ever happened to Yuya, Yugo, and Yuri.”

Yuto pauses. He folds his hands in his lap and stares at them. “We haven’t really talked about it since then. I don’t think we’re ready. We barely tell anyone else about it. Who would believe us? What could they do to help us? Now it’s not just my memories I have to deal with, but three other people’s as well. And Yuri’s memories…” Shun looks up. “He’s never been loved. He really, truly didn’t know any better. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what he did, nor does that make it okay, or lessen the pain of what happened to Ruri, but I have to give Yuri some credit. He’s trying to change, I can see it. And Shun, I’m not telling you this to make you feel anything for Yuri. It’s your right to be mad at him. It’s your right to be mad at me. This is a messed up situation no matter how you look at it. We’re all victims of Leo Akaba, and that includes Yuri.”

Shun closes his eyes. “He took my sister away from me.”

“I know,” Yuto says.

Shun clenches his jaw. “He said he was sorry.”

Yuto doesn’t say anything. Shun opens his eyes.

Yuto is crying. “Shun, I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you. And I’m sorry that I let you down.”

“What is Yuri to you?” Shun asks.

Yuto closes his eyes. “He’s…me, in another world. We are, in a way, still one person. He’s what I could have been if Leo Akaba had raised me. He’ll always be part of me.”

Shun feels like he’s been stabbed. “And what am I?”

Yuto bows his head. “My best friend. Someone precious to me. Someone I never want to lose. Someone I still love.”

“Even if I never forgive Yuri?” Shun demands.

Yuto looks up. “Even if you can’t forgive him I hope…that you don’t hate me, if I do.”

Shun puts his head in his hands. How can he make sense of this? Yuri and Yuto…how can they possibly be the same person? How can Yuri, the person who took Ruri, be anything like Yuto, the person that Shun has depended on for years, the person who saved Shun’s life more than once, who Shun saved more than once, the person Shun thought he’d lost forever?

Before Academia invaded, Ruri had teased Shun and Yuto sometimes. Their hands would brush when they reached for something at the same time, or they’d say something in unison, or they’d share a joke only they could understand.

“Kiss him, for heaven’s sake!” Ruri would yell, and Shun and Yuto would blush and stammer something.

They went to see a movie together. But it wasn’t a date. They had dinner together sometimes, but it wasn’t a date. Sometimes at school, they’d sneak into each other’s rooms at night and talk for hours, and fall asleep in the same bed. And then finally, they sat down and talked, and decided to go on a real date. To do what they always did, really, but to think of it as a date.

Then Academia came, and Shun lost Ruri. Yuto became more than a friend, more dear than a lover. He was Shun’s only link to his past, the one good thing left in Shun’s life.

Pulling himself out of his memories Shun asks, “Can we ever go back to how things were?”

Yuto sighs. “I don’t know. I want to.”

Shun takes Yuto’s hand. “Do you really mean that? Even with how things are?”

Yuto looks up. “Academia didn’t make me stop loving you. Neither did Leo Akaba, or—”

“Don’t,” Shun interrupts.

“Yuri,” Yuto presses on. “He’s part of me now, Shun.”

Shun’s mouth goes dry. He places his hand on Yuto’s cheek. “I guess…I guess it would be impossible for either of us to come out of this unchanged.”

Yuto places his hand on top of Shun’s. “I am still me, though,” he says. “I’m just me with…a deeper understanding of all of them. Yuya, Yuri, and Yugo. I have their memories but it didn’t change the way I feel about you.”

Shun’s chest aches. “Didn’t it?”

Yuto leans forward and presses a kiss to Shun’s lips. Shun breaks. He surges forward, catching Yuto before he can pull away, and he kisses Yuto the way he’s been imagining for months. The way he wished he’d kissed Yuto before he disappeared, the way he imagined kissing Yuto when they finally saw each other face-to-face again. Yuto whimpers into Shun’s mouth, he drags his fingers across Shun’s cheeks and Shun realizes that his cheeks are wet, and Yuto is wiping away his tears. Shun pushes Yuto down on the bed and covers Yuto’s body with his own.

“If you ever leave me again,” Shun gasps, and Yuto silences him with another kiss.

“I won’t,” Yuto promises, his lips pressed to Shun’s cheek. “I never will.”

Maybe, for now, that’s all Shun needs from Yuto.

**Author's Note:**

> *squints at the view counts* I guess people...like this series?
> 
> PS Dr. Aki Izayoi and Dr. Fudo. Eh? EEEEEEEEEHHHHHH????


End file.
